New Horizons

We got to the Moon in eight years using slide rules. We still haven't returned, despite four times the GDP, twice the population, and artificial intelligence. Robert Zubrin's diagnosis is blunt: the system is senile.In the final episode of season two, we speak with Dr. Robert Zubrin, aerospace engineer and probably the most influential advocate for human Mars settlement of the last thirty years. He developed the Mars Direct mission architecture with David Baker at Martin Marietta — the plan that made Mars look affordable by manufacturing return propellant on Mars rather than hauling it from Earth. Elon Musk read Zubrin's book The Case for Mars, which drew him to the Mars Society, and Starship runs on methane and oxygen for exactly the reason Mars Direct specified: it's the propellant you can make on Mars.The conversation covers why Zubrin thinks we should settle Mars, what caused decades of delay, and whether a Starship lands on Mars in 2029 or 2031. We get into terraforming, his response to the Jakosky 2018 study, and what he thinks about the health effects of space travel.We also discuss where he thinks Musk has it wrong, what the first settlement's economy looks like, how used Starships could put a seat to Mars within reach of ordinary people, and why he believes Martian colonies will be politically free rather than tyrannical.The Mars Society: https://www.marssociety.org/Their next convention is at USC, October 22-24: https://convention.marssociety.org/This podcast can also be found here: https://linktr.ee/new_horizons_thepodcast

It now takes around fourteen years and hundreds of millions of dollars to get a new drug approved in the United States — up from about four years in 1962. And despite decoding the human genome, AI for protein folding, and computational biology, the cost of developing an approved drug roughly doubles every nine years. Some call this Eroom's Law: Moore's Law in reverse.We sit down with Niklas Anzinger, founder and CEO of Infinita, which is building a biotech district in Próspera — the special economic zone on the island of Roatán in Honduras. Niklas's core thesis is that the bottleneck on medical progress isn't science, it's law, and that the solution is jurisdictional competition: places allowed to try different rules, so the good experiments can spread.The conversation covers where Próspera currently stands, including its ongoing legal fight with the Honduran government, and why Niklas is now bullish on US federalism and Right to Try laws in states like Montana and New Hampshire. We get into what actually makes clinical trials so expensive, the "invisible graveyard" of people who die waiting for drugs that were never developed, and the standard objection that these rules exist because of real historical harms like thalidomide.We also discuss whether governments should be treated as service providers competing for customers, why he thinks charter cities could be an equalizing force rather than a playground for the wealthy, and his prediction that AI companies moving into biotech will soon want jurisdictions of their own.Infinita: https://infinitavc.com/Próspera: https://www.prospera.co/Infinita Substack: https://substack.com/@infinitacoThis podcast can also be found here: https://linktr.ee/new_horizons_thepodcast

What if suffering isn't an unavoidable feature of conscious life, but a solvable engineering problem? Philosopher David Pearce has spent three decades arguing that we could — and morally should — use biotechnology to abolish suffering entirely, not just in humans but across all sentient life.We sit down with David Pearce, co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association (now Humanity+) alongside Nick Bostrom, and author of the 1995 manifesto The Hedonistic Imperative. His recent work with the Far Out Initiative draws inspiration from people like Jo Cameron, who because of a rare genetic mutation lives essentially without physical or psychological suffering — raising the question of whether that could eventually be given to everyone.The conversation covers what an "information-sensitive gradient of bliss" is and whether lower bliss states would just become the new suffering, why so many people find this project instinctively repellent, how you would manage ecosystems if predators no longer hunted, and the timeline for these interventions. We also venture into David's more heterodox views on physics and conciousness, e.g., why he thinks the binding problem is the thing most theories of consciousness quietly ignore.. From the practical question of what we should be doing right now, to the prediction that future generations may look back on Darwinian life the way we look back on the Dark Ages, this episode makes the case for one of the most radical, yet perhaps one of the most reasonable, ideas in contemporary philosophy.David's website: https://www.hedweb.com/Far Out Initiative: https://www.faroutinitiative.com/This podcast can also be found here: https://linktr.ee/new_horizons_thepod...

Cryonics has been around since the 1960s, but it's never had a good answer to a basic question: does it actually work? For most of its history, nobody could show that the preservation techniques being sold to dying people were saving anything at all.

In the first episode of Season 2, we sit down with Aurelia Song, founder and CTO of Nectome, who spent a decade trying to fix that. Her technique — aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation — won both the small and large mammal prizes from the Brain Preservation Foundation, prizes the traditional cryonics industry had failed to claim for years. This year, Nectome begins offering preservation to terminally ill patients for the first time.

The conversation covers how you preserve a brain well enough that every synapse survives, why the procedure has to begin within twelve minutes of death, and the surgical technique — deep hypothermic circulatory arrest — that gives us surprisingly strong evidence that memory is structural rather than electrical. We get into the chemistry of fixation, what electron microscopy can and can't tell us, why Aurelia is agnostic about how revival eventually happens, and the questions Nectome asks clients about what should be done with their preserved bodies if the future goes badly.

From the information-theoretic case for what it even means to preserve a person, to whether any of this still matters in a world of rapid AI progress and radical life extension, this episode asks what we owe to the future — and what the future might be able to do with what we leave it.

Nectome: https://nectome.com/

Nectome Substack: https://articles.nectome.com/

Aurelia's Lesswrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/aurelia

BPF: https://www.brainpreservation.org/

This podcast can also be found here: https://linktr.ee/new_horizons_thepodcast

As AI systems become increasingly sophisticated, one of the most profound questions facing humanity is emerging: could artificial intelligence already possess consciousness? And if so, how would we even know?

In this season finale, we explore the cutting-edge science of AI consciousness with Eric Elmoznino, a PhD student in Yoshua Bengio's lab at the University of Montreal. Eric's research focuses on bridging the gap between current AI capabilities and human-like conscious reasoning, studying how we might build AI systems that truly think rather than just process information.

The conversation covers what consciousness actually means in computational terms, whether today's large language models show signs of genuine understanding or sophisticated mimicry, and how we might design experiments to detect machine consciousness. We discuss the philosophical hard problem of consciousness, recent research on AI systems that claim to have subjective experiences, and what it would mean morally if we created conscious artificial minds.

From the technical challenges of measuring consciousness to the ethical implications of potentially conscious AI, this episode tackles one of the most important questions of our technological age: are we on the verge of creating digital minds that deserve moral consideration?

What if we could produce real meat without raising and slaughtering billions of animals? Cultivated meat - real animal tissue grown from cells in bioreactors - could revolutionize our food system within the next decade.We sit down with Riley Jackson from Ivy Farm Technologies to explore how this breakthrough technology works. From the science of growing meat in controlled environments to consumer acceptance challenges, we dive into both the promise and the practical hurdles of cellular agriculture.The conversation covers the dramatic cost reductions already achieved, the regulatory hurdles facing the industry, and what it will take to reach widespread adoption. We discuss why some countries like Italy have banned cultivated meat, the timeline for commercial availability, and the diverse array of possible products (yum!).From examining how cultivated meat solves multiple crises simultaneously, to asking whether we might look back at our current practices with moral disgust, this episode dives deep into what seems set to be the future of sustainable food production.

Supervolcanoes pose a greater statistical threat to humanity than asteroids or comets - yet while NASA actively tracks space threats and has plans to deflect them, we have no defense against volcanic catastrophes that could end civilization as we know it.In this episode, we explore the science of volcano monitoring and the controversial question of whether we could ever prevent an eruption. Joined by Dr. Mike Poland, Scientist-in-Charge at Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, we dive into how scientists monitor these sleeping giants using satellites, seismometers, and cutting-edge detection technologies.We discuss what the signs of an impending eruption would be, what a Yellowstone eruption would actually look like, the global catastrophe of volcanic winter, and why a NASA proposal to cool supervolcanoes through drilling has serious flaws. The conversation covers everything from Bayesian forecasting models to emergency evacuation scenarios, and whether future technology might give us tools to prevent these potentially civilization-ending events.From the latest monitoring technologies and how they've changed over time, to the harsh reality that evacuation might be our only option, this episode examines one of the underestimated existential risks facing humanity - and what we can actually do about it.

In this episode, I sit down with recent Georgia Tech graduate and friend of mine, Andre Suzanne, for a philosophical debate on one of humanity's oldest questions: does God exist? We explore some of the classic arguments that have shaped religious and philosophical thought for centuries.The conversation focuses mostly on foundational arguments like the First Mover, examining whether the universe requires a divine cause or can be explained through natural processes alone. We dive into questions of causation, the nature of existence, and whether philosophical reasoning can lead us to conclusions about these mysteries. In this informal discussion, we examine the logical structure of these age-old debates. From Aristotelian philosophy to modern cosmology, we consider questions that have puzzled thinkers for millennia: What caused the universe to exist? Can something come from nothing? And what role does reason play in questions of faith?Whether you're religious, atheist, or somewhere in between, this episode offers a thoughtful examination of arguments that continue to shape how we think about existence, causation, and the universe's origin.

LISA - the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna - will be humanity's first gravitational wave detector in space, launching in 2035. Unlike ground-based detectors like LIGO, LISA's three spacecraft will form a massive triangle 2.5 million kilometers on each side, allowing it to detect gravitational waves from entirely new sources.

Joined by Dr. Tamara Bogdanovic, astrophysicist at Georgia Tech, we explore how LISA could revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos. From detecting the primordial gravitational wave background - giving us a window into the universe just 10^-32 seconds after the Big Bang - to potentially discovering new physics beyond Einstein's general relativity.

The conversation covers LISA's incredible engineering challenges, what makes space-based detection superior to ground-based, and the revolutionary science it could unlock. We touch upon how it might confirm or challenge our theories of cosmic inflation, reveal exotic physics impossible to study in any laboratory, and open entirely new frontiers in gravitational wave astronomy.

From the technical details to the wildest discoveries LISA might make, this episode explores one of the most ambitious scientific projects ever attempted.

In this episode, we dive into the reproductive tech revolution – IVG in particular - and hear that biological children for same-sex couples are much closer than many people believe. The same goes for the end of infertility, a significant speed-up of agricultural yields, and a variety of other thought-provoking applications. We sit down with Jeff Hsu, co-founder of Ivy Natal, to discuss their breakthrough approach to creating functional egg cells from ordinary skin or blood cells. Unlike traditional methods, Ivy Natal uses "direct meiosis induction" to skip multiple conversion steps.Learn why we will see male-male couples with children before female-female couples, whether people could have children by themselves, how this technology can also potentially be applied to de-aging, how the regulatory environment influences the research directions, and much more. Ivy Natal: https://www.ivynatal.com/This podcast can also be found here: https://linktr.ee/new_horizons_thepodcast